The present invention generally relates to automated and integrated systems and methods for rapidly identifying chemicals with biological activity in liquid samples, particularly automated screening of low volume samples for new medicines, agrochemicals, or cosmetics.
Systems and methods for rapidly identifying chemicals with biological activity in samples, especially small liquid samples, can benefit a number of different fields. For instance, the agrochemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic fields all have applications where large numbers of liquid samples containing chemicals are processed. Currently, many such fields use various strategies to reduce processing times, such as simplified chemistry, semi-automation and robotics. While such strategies may improve the processing time for a particular type of liquid sample, process step or chemical reaction, such methods or apparatuses can seldom integrate the entire process, especially the generation or detection of chemical events in small volumes. Such apparatuses are also often limited in their application, since many of them are designed for, and dedicated to, a particular type of liquid sample or chemical reaction.
In most processes involving liquid samples, as the complexity of the liquid sample processing increases the process time per sample increases. Although, some very simple chemical reactions or liquid processing methods can achieve extremely high throughput rates, such as in the manufacturing of containerized liquids, complicated processing of liquids is typically several orders of magnitude slower. In some instances, the processing of liquid samples, such as in pharmaceutical arts, which usually demands complicated liquid processing for drug discovery, can obtain throughput rates of approximately 3,000 samples per day. This type of processing in general, however, uses liquid sample volumes on the order of 100 to 200 microliters, which often requires relatively large amounts of exotic and expensive reagents, and does not typically incorporate automated access to large stores of liquid reagents.
Consequently, there is a need to provide components, systems and methods for rapidly processing liquid samples at high throughput rates, particularly liquid samples of microliter volumes, one to ten microliters, to identify chemicals with useful activity.